Field of Invention
Various embodiments of the present invention relate to wireless communication, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for determining a component carrier for heterogeneous carrier aggregation.
Description of Related Art
With the rapid diffusion of smart phones, mobile communication services that used to be mostly about providing voice services have now changed their focus to data-centric services providing wireless multimedia contents. Thus, mobile data traffic is increasing rapidly. Especially, since 2011 when the number of smart phone terminals provided reached 20 million units, various mobile environments are being provided where web contents can be used freely. Furthermore, as tablet PCs such as iPads and galaxy tabs are also increasing at a rapid pace, the growth of wireless traffic is accelerating even more. However, the rapid growth of mobile data traffic that is centered-around smart devices is slowing down the speed of wireless internet significantly, making it difficult to even access wireless internet.
Various communication technologies are being developed to accommodate the rapidly increasing mobile traffic. For example, for 3GPP LTE-Advanced, various technologies have been developed, such as the multiple antenna based MIMO technique for increasing the transmission capacity of base stations, ICIC (Inter-Cell Interference Coordination) which is a technology for an efficient control of interference to increase the capacity in edge of cells, CoMPT™which is a coordinate transmission and reception technology, device-to-device communication technology for distributing traffic load in base stations, and cognitive radio technology for using idle TV bands (UHF bands).
Transmitting and receiving data using a broadband is one way of satisfying the data transmission speed which is one of the requirements of the IMT-Advanced technology. Accordingly, 3GPP designated the maximum bandwidth of LTE-A to 100 MHz. However, since it is difficult to allocate a frequency bandwidth of 100 MHz in limited wireless frequency resources, CA (carrier aggregation) technology was introduced. CA technology is a ‘communication technology of aggregating different frequency bands at the same time to create a broadband effect’.